Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

The OSGeo incubation committee

The first operational committee within OSGeo was the Incubator. It addresses 

the need for quality assurance that is missing in many open-source projects as was 

mentioned above. The Incubation Committee is formed by a broad group of de-

velopers from different backgrounds; programming languages include C/C++ and 

Java as well as web based technologies like PHP, JavaScript, Python and others.

Projects who are interested to join OSGeo first have to apply for the official in-

cubation process 

17

. One core criteria for acceptance is that all project code must 

be released under a license that has been legally confirmed by the Open-Source 

 Initiative 

18

. After a mentor who guides through the process is assigned the project 

can be accepted into incubation. Then the work starts: the source code is checked 

for license and copyright consistency and the governance of the project is evalu-

ated to prevent monopolistic structures. Basic requirements for professional devel-

opment have to be met including the use of code repositories, bug tracking sys-

tems and so on, all to assure highest quality.

17

 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Incubation 

18

 http://www.opensource.org

Figure 2.2: OSGeo’s structure.

Officers

Committees

Membership

Local

Chapters

Foundation

Projects

Executive Director

Board of Directors

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To graduate from incubation the project needs to abide by the open-source rules 

of OSGeo as set forth in the Incubation documents. After the assigned mentor sig-

nals that the project is ready to graduate the incubation committee will scrutinize 

the project as a whole and eventually vote and approve for graduation. The last 

step to become an official OSGeo project is the approval of the board of directors.

Once accepted as an official OSGeo project users can be sure that the legal, 

 organizational and technical structures of the project are healthy. Additionally, 

OSGeo will make sure that projects are provided with all that is needed to keep 

them going. Even in the case that a project falls out of use, the OSGeo communi-

ty will make sure that there is a viable exit strategy that can be tailored to fit with 

the  user’s change management. This way the continuity and reliability of software 

from the open-source domain is much higher than any proprietary company can 

possibly achieve. This is also the reason why many proprietary companies start to 

use OSGeo software in their proprietary products, a process that would not have 

been thinkable a few years back.